Search form

The other George Orwell

This lunchtime in Cheapside’s Daunt Books I watched an assistant stock the shelves with new editions of George Orwell’s best-known books. The most striking was David Pearson’s daring Nineteen Eighty-Four: adapted from the Penguin Classics series he successfully riffed upon for his Great Ideas, Great Loves, Popular Classics and Pocket Penguins.

The design makes a statement: both title and author have been censored. The status of Nineteen Eighty-Four is disproportionately skewed when placed beside the hobbitry of J R R Tolkein; but just as every child in Britain is at some point faced with the prospect of making tracks to Middle Earth, so they are, perhaps more crucially, ushered by their guardians into Room 101.

The new series also includes Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and Politics and the English Language. The reissues are officially released on 21 January, the day Orwell died. This date has been chosen by Penguin, the Orwell Estate and Orwell Prize to celebrate the prolific author’s life and work in perpetuity. You can view the range in full on the Creative Review website.

While the canon atrophies, spare a thought for the following three novels – snubbed by critics over the years, their pages browning in some abject corner of an Oxfam Bookshop near you.

The Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): Orwell’s most experimental novel, it includes a chapter in which the eponymous daughter, Dorothy Hare, spends time living rough in Trafalgar Square, written under the influence of the Circe (“Nighttown”) chapter of Ulysses. Follows Dorothy from her father’s country rectory to hop picking and homelessness after she suffers from amnesia and wakes up on the Old Kent Road. Contains some of Orwell’s most revealing thoughts about belief and the individual.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936): When he reviewed the book for the NS in 1936, Cyril Connolly called the book a “harrowing and stark account of poverty,” written “in clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is sitting in a dentist’s chair with the drill whirring”. He summed it up as follows: “The hero works for two pounds a week in a bookshop. He has a girl whom he is too poor to marry, and is writing a poem on which he is too poor really to concentrate. It is winter. The book is the recital of his misfortunes interrupted by tirades against money and spiritual evil it causes.”

Coming Up for Air (1939): Written in Morocco while Orwell coalesced following his return from the Spanish Civil War, the novel is narrated in the first-person by George Bowling, who revisits his childhood home only to find the country of his youth has been “paved over” and his erstwhile aspirations smothered by quotidian responsibilities. Bowling is, as Orwell himself put it in his essay about Miller's Tropic of Cancer, “inside the whale”, too busy with himself to resist the oncoming war, about to rip through the country, concrete and not.

Beginning on 21 January, the New Statesman website will run pieces from the archive by and about Orwell, including a piece the magazine’s editors famously refused to run.

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.